Today, Explained - Deporting Kilmar Abrego Garcia (to Uganda)

Episode Date: September 3, 2025

The US government is trying to deport Kilmar Abrego Garcia again. It's part of a larger war on immigrants that could lead to a smaller, poorer America. This episode was produced by Miles Bryan and Rebeca Ibarra, edited by Amina Al-Sadi, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, engineered by Andrea Kristinsdottir and Matthew Billy, and hosted by Sean Rameswaram. Kilmar Abrego Garcia and his wife Jennifer Vasquez Sura after a prayer vigil before entering an ICE field office. Photo by Andrew Harnik/Getty Images. Listen to Today, Explained ad-free by becoming a Vox Member: vox.com/members. Transcript at vox.com/today-explained-podcast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Presidente Trump has said he wants to deport a million people out of the United States every year. One million illegal aliens per year. Thus far in 2025, he's falling well short of that goal. Estimates are in the neighborhood of 200,000 as of August. But the one deportee most people can name remains Kilmar Abrego Garcia. My name is Kilmar Abrago Garcia. After months in a Salvadoran labor camp prison complex, Abrago-Garcia returned to the United States in June. But the latest news is that the federal government wants to deport him to Uganda.

He needs to never be in the United States of America, and our administration is making sure we're doing all that we can to bring him to justice. We're going to try and understand why and wrap our heads around what his story tells us about our country on today explained. Support for this show comes from Indeed. Indeed, sponsored jobs help you stand out and hire fast. With sponsored jobs, your post jumps to the top of the page for your relevant candidates. So you can reach the people you want faster. And listeners of this show will get a $75-sponsored job credit to get your jobs more visibility

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You're listening to Today Explained. You're listening to Today Explained. My name is Ellie Honig. I am CNN's senior legal analyst. I'm a former federal and state prosecutor. I am a writer for New York Magazine and Cafe. I'm part of the Vox family. And I have a new book coming up called When.

you come at the king inside DOJ's pursuit of the president from Nixon to Trump. Outstanding. And the last time I heard you say that was the last time you were on the show, which was back in April when we were last discussing the Abrago Garcia case. At the time, of course, he was stuck in El Salvador. Where is he now? He is physically located in the United States in Virginia. I guess that's the good news for Kilmar-Abrigo-Garcia. The bad news is he's in custody. He is in the custody of immigration officials, because the one thing I want to say right at the outset, to try to understand this whole saga around Kilmar-Abrego-Garcia, you have to understand there are two separate proceedings happening at the same time, but separate from one

another, parallel, really. One of them is he's here in the country, in the United States, illegally, and so immigration authorities are trying to deport him. That's happening in the immigration courts. Separately, but mostly simultaneously, he also has a criminal case. He's now been charged by indictment with certain federal crimes by the U.S. Department of Justice. So he's fighting both of those battles at once. But as we speak, he is in the United States. He's in Virginia in a federal immigration detention facility. I feel like this story got a lot of attention early on because it was kind of easy to understand why this would upset people. But now it's gotten so complicated. It still feels like it's upsetting people. But can you help us

understand how deeply complex it is exactly. Can we take it chronologically from like where we last left off in El Salvador? Kilmar Brago Garcia gets deported in March. He's here illegally. He gets deported, but to wear El Salvador. The one place on the globe, the United States government, was not allowed to send Kilmar Brago Garcia, was El Salvador. There was a preexisting order from a judge saying he cannot be sent there because he has shown that he might face the risk of persecution or retribution. This man lived here, had lived here for quite a few years, but he was picked up by ice, and then in spite of a judge's order saying that he should not be deported to El Salvador, he was sent to that prison that we've all seen on TV. The filing said, in part, quote,

Abrago and 20 other Salvadorans were forced to kneel from approximately 9 p.m. to 6 a.m. Abrago Garcia was denied bathroom access and soiled himself. Initially, the administration admitted in court that that was a clerical. error they claimed. Case winds its way up to the U.S. Supreme Court. And the U.S. Supreme Court says, well, you must, quote, facilitate, and this word got a lot of scrutiny, facilitate his return to the United States. What does the Trump administration do? They give that word facilitate, essentially its narrowest possible interpretation. And they do next to nothing. And they basically take the position of, well, if he should happen to arrive here, then I guess we'll let him in. And for a while,

when we last spoke, he was in a sort of purgatory. The big change in this case was the Department of Justice indicted Kilmara Brago-Garcia. Good afternoon. We're here today to announce a major update in an important case. And what they did at that point is they brought him back to the United States. They made a big splashy announcement by the AG. He's been indicted and we're bringing back here now because he's a criminal and we're going to prosecute him. The grand jury found that over the past nine years of Rego Garcia has played a significant role in an alien smuggling ring.

He was a smuggler of humans and children and women. And so he was brought back to the country to face prosecution. But what has happened since then, this picks up where my last answer left off is he got bail on the criminal case because this criminal case is so flimsy and such a mess. And therefore, he was technically free. So he got released on the criminal side, but immediately the immigration side swoops in and picks him back off, which brings us to him being in custody of Virginia. So before we get to this sort of the two separate proceedings thing, why did the United States government indict him and bring him back? Was there pressure to do that, or were they just like maybe we have a better chance with this other path? I think really the play there was political.

I think it's a PR play because what happened while Kim Mara Brigo-Garcia was in this purgator. while he was in El Salvador and there was this sort of stalemate about what's going to happen, this debate broke out, this political debate, where Democrats, I'll generalize here, we're saying, I'm not vouching for the man. I'm standing up for his rights because all of our rights are at risk if we don't. The Trump administration and others were saying, yeah, but he's a horrible guy, he's a gangster, he's vicious, he's violent, he's a terrorist. What DOJ did when they got this indictment is, first of all, they brought him back to prosecute him.

You don't, that is almost never the way things are done. You don't deport someone, let them, you know, sort of waste away for a few months, and then bring them back to prosecute them and then potentially just re-deport them. It makes no sense. That's number one. Number two, the way DOJ rolled out this case to me was such a tell that it was political. The charges here against Kilmara-Brigo Garcia are that he basically drove illegal aliens across state lines. That's it.

Yet if you looked at the DOJ announcement, Pam Bondi made a televised announcement with the cameras from behind the podium, they say in the announcements, not in the indictment, but in their various announcements. A co-conspirator alleged that the defendant solicited nude photographs and videos of a minor. A co-conspirator also alleges the defendant played a role in the murder of a rival gang member's mother. None of that's charged, but now what happens? It's all out there. People on the administration side say, see, these facts demonstrate Abrago Garcia is a danger to our community. And then the defense lawyers

essentially pick it apart, which is why he got bail. For the first time in five months, Kilmar-Abrego-Garcia is no longer in federal custody and finally is reunited with his family. So he gets bail in this criminal case. He still has

the ongoing proceedings regarding his status in this country. How does he get bail in the first place? So one of the big questions when you're arguing bail and the federal, and again, we're now on the criminal side is how strong is the evidence of this person's guilt? I've done, I don't know, more bail arguments than I could ever count. And the defense lawyers really expose that the charges against Kilmarabrego Garcia were incredibly flimsy and based sometimes on third and fourth hand hearsay. So I'll give you

one example. One of the arguments that prosecutors made to keep Kilmara Brago locked up on the criminal case is, well, we have evidence that he was transporting minors. Okay. The way they established that is prosecutors pointed to a handwritten note. Now, they don't know who wrote the note. They don't know where it came from, but it's a handwritten note that was in a cop's files. A cop had done a traffic stop of Kilmar-Abrego-Garcia. And one of the notes seems to reflect that somebody in the car had a birth date of 2007. And so prosecutors can't explain who wrote that note or who it refers to, but they say, look, 2007, that would make the person a minor. Then somebody photographs that.

handwritten note. Then a cop sees the photograph of the handwritten note. Then a cop tells an FBI agent about the handwritten note. And then the FBI agent testifies to the grand jury. So you can count. That's three, four levels of hearsay. And here's an even bigger kicker. And the judge found this. When you look at the handwritten note, it's not even clear whether that note says 2007, which would make the person a minor or 2001. You know, the seven and the one are kind of a little close in how they look, which would make the person not a minor. And on top of that, prosecutors don't even know who the note refers to. They don't know if it's a boy or a girl, a man or a woman, a minor or an adult.

They can't locate the person. They can't put a name on the person. So that's how flimsy the government's proof is in this case. And that's a reason that the judge cited, she said, it doesn't mean the case is over. It just means he's getting out on bail. And that led to him then three days later being re-incarcerated, re-locked up on the immigration side of things. And this is where Uganda enters the chat? Exactly.

At this point, and this is where it starts to be almost overtly retributive. Garcia has said he doesn't want to go back home to El Salvador. That's what he said. So we're honoring that request by providing him with an alternate place to live. We're not a travel booking agency. It's not our job to say to illegal alien terrorists. Pick your favorite destination in the world and we'll send you a charter jet there. And now what his lawyers have done is said, whoa, whoa, whoa, put a pause on that.

He has a right to contest that because you don't have a lot of say if you're in the country illegally about where you get deported to, but you do have a right to do process to argue maybe I'm not the guy, maybe I'm not here illegally, and to argue that he would face persecution or danger if sent to that country. And so there's now a different federal judge involved who's sort of overseeing the immigration case who has said, basically, I don't trust you, government. You've played fast and loose. and you are not to move him out of this country

until I've had a chance to decide this. And so the judge is going to figure out whether it makes sense to send him to Uganda. And what's really crazy about this is Abrago Garcia's lawyers have said he will gladly, they had done some work they had connected with the government of Costa Rica and said, please, just send it.

You can get rid of him if you want. Just send him to Costa Rica. He'll be safe there. We've worked it out. And the U.S. government has said, no. I mean, if their concern was really getting him out of the country, this could be over by now. And because you've been inside this system, Ellie, do you see the system working throughout the

three, four, or five months of this Kilmar-Abrego-Garcia case? Or do you see it failing more? I think it's, well, it's certainly failed with respect to Kilmar-Abrigo-Garcia. And I should note, by the way, that when this indictment was being put together, a veteran career, nonpartisan prosecutor in that U.S. Attorney's Office resigned in protest. And I think that tells you something. But they failed. They failed over and over and over again. Now he's sitting in detention and he might not even get to go to Uganda like they want because there'll probably be a lot of protest over it. I don't know.

We'll see. But does that give you hope or no? I mean, I'm not looking for the hope. I'm just curious from your expertise. Yes, I think I do. I think the courts have done their job here. I think so far, and that applies to the judge in the criminal case, the Supreme Court justice. I mean, a lot of people, a lot of judges have done the right thing here and have said, no, you have to follow the rules.

You have to do things by the book. you have to remain accountable. But I guess from a political calculation, what does one fear more? On the one hand, you know, having a bunch of legal setbacks coming out in these judicial opinions that are sort of nuanced or just being able to say, we got this horrible guy, we want him out and Democrats want to keep him in here. And look, you know, they want this terrorist to move in next to you. Like, what plays better with the American public?

I'm not so sure. Ellie Honig, if you like books, check his out once more. It's called When You Come at the King Inside DOJ's Pursuit of the President. From Nixon to Trump, it drops in a few days. The president and his administration are using Kilmar-Abrego-Garcia to scare off other immigrants to deter them. The consequences when we're back on Today Explained.

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You can turn your big business idea into reality with Shopify on your side. You can sign up for your $1 per month trial and start selling today at Shopify.com slash explained. You can go to Shopify.com slash explained. Does anyone have a cash register handy? Today. Derek Thompson co-wrote a book called Abundance. You may have heard of it, but he's also got a substack.

And on it this week, he wrote that the United States is on the precipice of a historic, if dubious, achievement. We asked him to tell us about it. Well, for the entirety of American history. The U.S. has only known population growth. The U.S. grew through the Civil War. We grew through the Spanish flu. We grew through both world wars. We grew through COVID, even despite the deaths of a million people.

But Donald Trump is on the precipice of a truly historic and, as you said, dubious achievement. In 2025, it is absolutely possible that the U.S. population shrinks for the first time on record. And the math here is straightforward. There is only two ways. is for population to grow. There's something called natural increase, which is births minus deaths, and there's net immigration, which is migrants who arrive minus migrants who leave. Last year, births outnumbered deaths by about 500,000 people. And that straightforwardly means that if net immigration declines by more than 500,000, the U.S. could shrink for the first time

in history, and several demographers are in fact forecasting that net immigration could be negative 500,000 or in excess of that. And that would mean, essentially, that yes, the U.S. would, America would, for the first time ever, be a shrinking nation. Is the reason that this isn't, like, above the fold, you know, breaking news because we don't actually know if this is for sure going to happen next year, this year? Yeah, we don't know this is going to happen. So I spoke to William Fry, who's a really renowned demographer and a senior fellow at Brookings Institution, and I said, you know, do you think it's possible? The U.S. shrinks this year. And he said, quote, it's certainly possible. My bet at the beginning of 2025 was that growth would be positive but very slow, but it's certainly possible that the population could shrink this year. So one possibility is that I'm wrong and the U.S. doesn't shrink this year. I do think population growth will be very low. But I think most simply the reason why we aren't talking about this is that I don't think enough people have put together the basic math here. Number one, natural increase, births minus deaths, is very low. U.S. fertility is low.

I write a lot about that. And number two, net immigration is low because of all these deportations and all the migrants that the Trump administration is scaring away from even trying to enter the U.S. in the first place. You think a lot about shrinking birth rates. We just spent half our show talking about Kilmar-Abrego-Garcia, and these two very different stories somehow meet in the middle of this thing we're talking about right now, which is where this country's population might be heading. How does something like the story of Kilmar-Abrego-Garcia tie in to what might be happening

right now with the country's population? Well, immigration politics clearly has swung in a pendulum over the last few years, right? Donald Trump's first term had some very cruel policies. I'm establishing new vetting measures to keep radical Islamic terrorists out of the United States of America. We don't want them here. The executive order also stops the refugee program altogether for all refugees from anywhere for four months pending a review and installs an indefinite ban on Syrian refugees.

More than 10,000 asylum seekers at the southern border have been sent back under the controversial remain-in-Mexico policy. Nineteen hundred and ninety-five children were taken from their migrant parents at the border. That's an average of 48 kids separated from their families per day. And then Joe Biden responded to those cruel policies by liberalizing immigration and liberalizing asylum law. And that created some years of the highest in migration in American history. I think in 2023, 2024, we had in excess of 2.3, 2.5 million immigrants coming into the U.S. That's extraordinary. And there was a backlash against that migrant surge.

Last week, a lot of people came in from the Congo, a big prison in the country. Congo and Africa. Welcome to the United States. We don't want to blame immigrants for higher housing prices, but we do want to blame Kamala Harris for letting in millions of illegal aliens into this country, which does drive up cost him. And that backlash is partly, not exclusively, but partly responsible for Donald Trump being the president now. And he has swung the pendulum all the way back to not only shutting down the border, but also these extra legal deportations, these in many cases illegal deportations, scaring migrants from coming over in the first place, sending ice into all these cities and

rounding up people that he thinks doesn't look, that they think don't look like native-born Americans. But what's really historic, I think, is combining that with the fact that, as you said, the fertility rate is low enough that without consistent immigration, the U.S. is going to shrink very, very soon. Most demographers thought the U.S. wasn't going to shrink until the 2070s, 2080s, Donald Trump's immigration policies might pull forward that moment of American shrinkage 60 years. And you wrote on your substack about how this is going to affect three essential sectors of American life, food, housing, health care.

Please indulge us. Well, little in life is more fundamental, right, than food, shelter, and medicine. So it's pretty important that immigrants play a disproportionate role in each. I'm going to start with farming. Two-thirds of agricultural workers or immigrants. Two-thirds. So in the absence of no. new migrant arrivals.

Farms are going to struggle in a number of ways. They can struggle to find replacements, and then wages go up for people working in agriculture. That can be really good for folks working in agriculture, but it means higher prices for people who are buying, produce, milk, meat at the grocery store, and we're already dealing with years of higher inflation. Housing immigrants account for about 50%, 60% of roofers, painters, drywall installers, plasterers. So you need construction workers. you need immigrants to build houses.

And in fact, if you look across the country, 30 to 40% of the construction labor force is foreign-born in Florida, in Georgia, in Texas, in Nevada, in California, in New York. Almost all of the largest housing markets are incredibly dependent on foreign labor. So sometimes you hear this thing about, like, you know, I say, you know, America's going to shrink this year. And people say, oh, you know, thank God. You know, everywhere's too crowded. immigrants are competing for houses. They're competing for jobs. This is going to be fantastic for the country.

Well, guess what happens if you don't have enough people to build houses? You don't have enough houses. What happens to housing prices? They don't go down. They go up because there's a housing shortage. And then finally, healthcare. Yeah, we're an aging nation, and we need more clinicians, and we need more caregivers. And in a world with low immigration, we're going to have fewer clinicians and fewer caregivers.

This was one of the things that really surprised me most in my reporting. I mean, just how immigrant-heavy the American medical labor force is, foreign-born people account for up to 25, 27 percent of America's physicians and surgeons. One in six people working across the health care sector are foreign-born. And so if you have an aging country and you have fewer people to care for them, then once again, you could have higher prices and just, you know, longer lines at the hospitals, fewer people to be that home health aid for your sick parent, your sick grandparent, your uncle. So once again, I see major, major problems coming in a world that we have fewer immigrants.

Do you see the Trump administration trying to sort of counter their immigration policies with the effects they may have on the economy with other policies? Are they aware of these pain points? There are definitely folks the Trump administration that just want in America with fewer people and certainly want in America with fewer non-war. people. I mean, that's clear. I'm more interested in how Donald Trump will use immigration policy as a weapon. So one of the things I'm most interested in is Donald Trump's sort of theory of economic power. And as far as I can tell, it's something like this. He has a three-step formula

for everything that he does. Step one, create pain. Step two, offer to remove pain. Step three, demand tribute. How can you use immigration policy in this way? Well, immigration policy that's restrictive is painful for cities and states and companies and industries that rely on immigrants, right? So you can imagine maybe some hospital or some city, you know, that's maybe struggling with population growth in 2026, 2027, going to Donald Trump and saying, can you please change your immigration policy? And then maybe he'll change immigration policy only if they offer him something in return. So that's one way I think the politics of American stagnation could be quite interesting. So do you think if this goes,

badly in the coming years, if people attribute a negative economic circumstance to these policies, that we could just have another shift and reverse some of what's happened in the past six months? Yeah, I absolutely do. As I wrote in my piece, I think many Americans clearly did not like the era of mass immigration, record high immigration under Joe Biden, but I think they might hate the era of record deportations even more. It's hard, I think, sometimes, to really take the temperature of the median voter when it comes to immigration policy. But if I had to do my best, I would say that the median American voter wants positive immigration that feels orderly. And what happens is that immigration politics swings either too far to the left or too far to the right in a way that makes them continually punish whoever the incumbent is in power.

And right now, I think we have an immigration policy that is unjust, unfair, and incredibly. I'm incredibly disordered, at least if you're around a place where ICE members are knocking on doors and asking random people to show their papers. Or if your name is Kilmar Abrego Garcia. Indeed. Derek Thompson, he's also got a podcast. It's called Plain English. Miles Brian and Rebecca Ibarra made Today Explain Today. Amina Al-Sari edited.

Laura Bullard fact-checked and Matthew Billy and Andrea Christen's Doctor Mix. And today's the last day I'll be saying Andrea's name on the show, at least for a while. We call her Andy, by the way. Andy's got a new gig. She's sad to go, and we'll be sad to lose her. But we are not mad at her. In fact, we're happy for her, and we're going to miss her.

Bye, Andy. Blas, bless, bless, I love you, and thank for me. Thank you.